Amy Levy's Fate

The narrative trajectory of this biography begins and ends with the suicide of the writer Amy Levy at the age of 27 on 9 September 1889. That tragic end gives direction to Christine Pullen's wide-ranging study of Levy and her work, while haunting it. Self-destruction is a famously elusive quarry, not just for friends and family, but also for biographers. Emile Durkheim's sociological investigation, still well-known to scholars, is the thin tip of a dense iceberg of mostly-forgotten writings from Levy's era. Suicide was a key topos for the emerging social sciences, which preferred to examine it statistically, so dim were the prospects of explaining the irrational acts of individuals. A biographer, writing more than a century later, faces much greater impediments, since Levy's life is only very imperfectly documented by original sources. While her suicide heightened the interest of contemporaries, it also summoned to action the forces of repression. The book was made possible by a trove of recently uncovered documents, which, however, Levy's heirs censored to conceal whatever seemed not respectable, including almost everything that might shed light on the sources of her despair

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